Question

This is an example of a bash script which checks for some running process (daemon or service) and does specific actions (reload, sends mail) if there is no such process running.

check_process(){
        # check the args
        if [ "$1" = "" ];
        then
                return 0
        fi

        #PROCESS_NUM => get the process number regarding the given thread name
        PROCESS_NUM='ps -ef | grep "$1" | grep -v "grep" | wc -l'
        # for degbuging...
        $PROCESS_NUM
        if [ $PROCESS_NUM -eq 1 ];
        then
                return 1
        else
                return 0
        fi
}

# Check whether the instance of thread exists:
while [ 1 ] ; do
        echo 'begin checking...'
        check_process "python test_demo.py" # the thread name
        CHECK_RET = $?
        if [ $CHECK_RET -eq 0 ]; # none exist
        then
                # do something...
        fi
        sleep 60
done

However, it doesn’t work. I got “ERROR: Garbage option.” for the ps command. What’s wrong with these scripts? Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want to execute that command, you should probably change:

PROCESS_NUM='ps -ef | grep "$1" | grep -v "grep" | wc -l'

to:

PROCESS_NUM=$(ps -ef | grep "$1" | grep -v "grep" | wc -l)